The Gift of Being Yourself E-Book

David G. Benner

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: The Spiritual Journey
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Embark on the Spiritual Journey of Knowing Your True Self "Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee." —Augustine Much is said in Christian circles about knowing God. But what if there is also value in knowing yourself? Christians throughout the ages have agreed that there cannot be deep knowledge of God without deep knowledge of the self. Discerning your true self is inextricably related to discerning God's purposes for you. Paradoxically, the more you become like Christ, the more you become authentically yourself. In this exploration of Christian identity, psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner illuminates the spirituality of self-discovery. He exposes the false selves that you may hide behind and calls you to discover the true self that emerges from your uniqueness in Christ. Freeing you from illusions about yourself, Benner shows that self-understanding leads to the fulfillment of your God-given destiny and vocation. Through The Gift of Being Yourself, you can: - Identify and let go of the false selves that hold you back. - Discover your true self rooted in your identity in Christ. - Understand God's purpose for your life through deeper self-awareness. - Embrace authenticity without needing to compare or strive to be someone you're not. This expanded edition, one of three books in The Spiritual Journey trilogy, includes a new epilogue and an experiential guide with questions for individual reflection or group discussion. You don't need to try to be someone you are not. Instead, as you uncover your true self, you'll deepen your experience of God through discovering the gift of being yourself. "In contrast to other books filled with drive-through pop psychology and sound-bite spirituality, Benner, a psychologist and spiritual director, offers an impressively deep and challenging introduction to Christian self-discovery..." – Publishers Weekly Starred Review, January 2004

Leseprobe

The Spiritual Journey

When applied to the spiritual life, the metaphor of a journey is both helpful and somewhat misleading. Helpfully it reflects the fact that the essence of spirituality is a process—specifically, a process of transformation. Unhelpfully it obscures the fact that we are already what we seek and where we long to arrive—specifically, in God. Once we realize this, the nature of the journey reveals itself to be more one of awakening than accomplishment, more one of spiritual awareness than spiritual achievement.

There are, however, two very good reasons to describe the spiritual life in terms of a journey. First, it fits well with our experience. We are aware that the self that begins the spiritual journey is not the same as the one that ends it. The changes in identity and consciousness—how we understand what it means to be me and our inner experience of passing through life—are both sufficiently profound as to be best described as transformational. The same is true for the changes in our capacity for love and the functioning of our will and desires.

The second reason is that the spiritual journey involves following a path. Much more than adopting a set of beliefs, a path is a practice or set of practices that will characterize our whole life. Following this path is the way we participate in our transformation. It is the way we journey into God and, as we do, discover that all along we have already been in God. It is the way our identity, consciousness and life become grounded in our self-in-God and God’s self-in-us.

Christian spirituality is taking on the mind and heart of Christ as we recognize Christ as the deepest truth of our being. It is actualizing the Christ who is in us. It is becoming fully and deeply human. It is experiencing and responding to the world through the mind and heart of God as we align ourselves with God’s transformational agenda of making all things new in Christ. It is participating in the very life of God.

This trilogy describes the foundational Christian practice of surrender, how this practice emerges as a response to Perfect Love, and the changes this produces in our identity, will and deepest desires. Each of the three books focuses on one of these strands while interweaving it with the others. Together they serve as a manual for walking the spiritual path as God’s heart and mind slowly but truly become our own. The Spiritual Journey trilogy includes:

Surrender to Love: Discovering the Heart of Christian Spirituality

The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

Desiring God’s Will: Aligning Our Hearts with the Heart of God

THE GIFT OF BEING YOURSELF

The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

DAVID G. BENNER

Foreword byM. Basil Pennington

www.IVPress.com/books

To

Gary Moon

and

Jeff and DeAnne Terrell

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself. and if I find my true self I will find Him.

Thomas Merton

Contents

Foreword by M. Basil Pennington

Preface: Identity and Authenticity

1 Transformational Knowing of Self and God

2 Knowing God

3 First Steps Toward Knowing Yourself

4 Knowing Yourself as You Really Are

5 Unmasking Your False Self

6 Becoming Your True Self

Epilogue: Identity and the Spiritual Journey

Appendix: For Reflection and Discussion

A Six-Session Discussion Guide to The Gift of Being Yourself

A One-Session Discussion Guide to The Gift of Being Yourself

Notes

Praise for The Gift of Being Yourself

About the Author

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Foreword

by Dom M. Basil Pennington, OSCO

I number reading Dr. David Benner’s previous volume, Surrender to Love, among the great graces of my life. Now the doctor gifts us with another slim, powerful volume. Benner’s writing is powerful here, as elsewhere, because it comes out of deep personal experience that he courageously shares with his readers. He writes credibly of God because, as he says, he knows God, and “God is the only context in which [our] being makes sense.” And again, in his eminently practical and compassionate way, Benner shows us step by step how to enter into the wisdom he shares.

One of the retirement projects I had assigned myself (when retirement was far off!) was to take in the rich insights of some of the great theological thinkers of our times—Bernard Lonergan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Dunne—and re-present them in simpler terms that would make them more readily accessible to the ordinary reader so that they could impact his or her life. Without realizing it, David Benner has done something of this, making accessible to us in a most readable but no less rich text some of the exciting insight of Teilhard de Chardin—I think here especially of The Divine Milieu. The all-pervasive immanence of God, who ever brings us forth in his creative love and is with us in all we do, is given immediate pastoral significance. Reading this volume, one’s mind cannot but jump forward to embracing the sacredness of all human life with its practical implications in regard to abortion, so-called mercy killing, the death penalty, weaponry and war, ecological care so that our planet will sustain the next generations, and the appropriate sharing of what we now have to sustain life in this generation.

Some will also perceive that Benner is giving us a very enriching companion text for what is probably the most powerful spiritual program developed in the last century, the Twelve-Step Program, now adapted to so many of our deepest ills. Any older person with the insight that comes with years and especially retirement finds himself convicted of having in some ways lived the “lie that grew from the soil of self-ignorance.”

The doctor assails us again and again with one-liners that hit home with painful accuracy. Startling sentences jump out to inscribe themselves in our memory and continuously call us forth into truth:

Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.

Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love.

If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less?

Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

We believe we know how to take care of our needs better than God.

We all tend to fashion a god who fits our falsity.

We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.

Jesus is the True Self who shows us by his life how to find our self in relation to God.

Our happiness is important to God.

—just to list a few.

This is a very challenging book. If we do listen to it fully and seek to implement it in our life, it will lead to a transformation. That will mean the death of our carefully cultivated false self. This hurts, to say the very least. If I were sinless, the perfect image of God, I could know the God of love. But knowing myself as the sinner enables me to know something more: a God of mercy—something greater, for love responds to what is good and lovable; mercy responds to what is not good and makes it good and lovable, the gift of being myself.

David’s book has just begun to do its work within me. I shall spend many hours with it, hours that I trust will be very fruitful. And I hope that will be your experience also.

Preface

Identity and Authenticity

It is a profound irony to write a book promoting self-discovery to people who are seeking to follow a self-sacrificing Christ. It might well make you fear that I have forgotten—or worse, failed to take seriously—Jesus’ paradoxical teaching that it is in losing our self that we truly find it (Matthew 10:39). As you read on I think you will see that I have done neither.

While concepts such as self-discovery, identity and authenticity are easily dismissed as mere psychobabble, each has an important role to play in the transformational journey of Christian spirituality. Even in the Matthew passage just referenced, Jesus talks as much about self-discovery as self-sacrifice! But there is no question that the journey of finding our truly authentic self in Christ and rooting our identity in this reality is dramatically different from the agenda of self-fulfillment promoted by pop psychology.

The absurdity of a pop psychology approach to the self is epitomized in a cartoon I recently saw. Addressing a stranger at a party, a woman says, “I don’t know anybody here but the hostess—and, of course, in a much deeper sense, myself.” Quite obviously, there are many profoundly non-Christian and often quite ridiculous ways of pursuing self-discovery and authenticity!

Still, Christian spirituality has a great deal to do with the self, not just with God. The goal of the spiritual journey is the transformation of self. As we shall see, this requires knowing both our self and God. Both are necessary if we are to discover our true identity as those who are “in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:17), because the self is where we meet God. Both are also necessary if we are to live out the uniqueness of our vocation.

In all of creation, identity is a challenge only for humans. A tulip knows exactly what it is. It is never tempted by false ways of being. Nor does it face complicated decisions in the process of becoming. So it is with dogs, rocks, trees, stars, amoebas, electrons and all other things. All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him. Humans, however, encounter a more challenging existence. We think. We consider options. We decide. We act. We doubt. Simple being is tremendously difficult to achieve and fully authentic being is extremely rare.

Body and soul contain thousands of possibilities out of which you can build many identities. But in only one of these will you find your true self that has been hidden in Christ from all eternity. Only in one will you discover your unique vocation and deepest fulfillment. But, as Dag Hammarskjöld argues, you will never find this “until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.”1

We all live searching for that one possible way of being that carries with it the gift of authenticity. We are most conscious of this search for identity during adolescence, when it takes front stage. At this stage of life we try on identities like clothing, looking for a style of being that fits with how we want to be seen. But even long after adolescence has passed, most adults know the occasional feeling of being a fraud—a sense of being not what they pretend to be but rather precisely what they pretend not to be. With a little reflection, most of us can become aware of masks that we first adopted as strategies to avoid feelings of vulnerability but that have become parts of our social self. Tragically, we settle easily for pretense, and a truly authentic self often seems illusory.

There is, however, a way of being for each of us that is as natural and deeply congruent as the life of the tulip. Beneath the roles and masks lies a possibility of a self that is as unique as a snowflake. It is an originality that has existed since God first loved us into existence. Our true self-in-Christ is the only self that will support authenticity. It and it alone provides an identity that is eternal.

Finding that unique self is, as noted by Thomas Merton, the problem on which all our existence, peace and happiness depend.2 Nothing is more important, for if we find our true self we find God, and if we find God, we find our most authentic self.

Becoming Your True Self

Being yourself would not make any spiritual sense if your uniqueness were not of immense value to God. But each person is exactly that—of inestimable value to God.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

As we shall see in what follows, there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But the uniqueness that comes from being our true self is not a uniqueness of our own making. Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.

The desire for uniqueness is a spiritual desire. So too is the longing to be authentic. These are not simply psychological longings, irrelevant to the spiritual journey. Both are the response of spirit to Spirit—the Holy Spirit calling us home to our place and identity in God.

Being most deeply your unique self is something that God desires, because your true self is grounded in Christ. God created you in uniqueness and seeks to restore you to that uniqueness in Christ. Finding and living out your true self is fulfilling your destiny.

This book is about the transformational journey of becoming our true self-in-Christ and living out the vocation that this involves. After the case for the interdependence of knowing God and self is laid out in chapter one, the book is organized around three broad needs faced by all Christians who seek to put themselves at God’s disposal:

The need for a transformational knowing of God that comes from meeting God in the depths of our beings. This is the focus of chapter two.

The need for a transformational knowing of ourselves that comes from discovering how we are known by God. This is the focus of chapters three, four and five. (Devoting three chapters to knowing self and only one to knowing God does not mean that I think knowing self is more important than knowing God. It reflects the fact that while there are thousands of books on knowing God, very little is written on the role of knowing self in Christian spirituality. Also, because of the interdependence of these two forms of knowing, we will repeatedly encounter ways of knowing God throughout the chapters that explore ways of knowing self.)

The need to find our identity, fulfillment and vocation in our hidden self in Christ—the focus of chapter six.

The transformational journey is not as linear as this implies, so actually the discussion will weave back and forth among these topics. Furthermore, the dimensions of the journey are interrelated. As we shall see, true knowing of our self demands that we know our self as known by God, and true knowing of God demands that we know God not just as an abstraction or as objective data but in and through our lived experience.

I pray that what follows will help you discover the uniqueness of who you were called from eternity to be. I trust that it will help you know both yourself and God more deeply, and thus discover the gift of truly being yourself.

Sydney, Australia

Fourth Thursday of Lent

one

Transformational Knowing of Self and God

In the epigraph that opens this book, Thomas Merton tells us what he considers the most important thing in the whole world—that on which his entire existence, happiness and peace depend. What would you identify as the most important thing for your existence and well-being? How do you think most Christians you know would answer the question?

Many Christians I know would answer with two words: “Finding God.” Others might use the language of knowing, loving and serving God. Some would include the church or relationships with other people in their answer. However they would express it, I suspect that most Christians would say something about God but would not make any reference to self.

To suggest that knowing God plays an important role in Christian spirituality will not surprise anyone. To suggest that knowing self plays an equally important role will set off warning bells for many people—being perhaps just the sort of thing you might expect from an author who is a psychologist, not a theologian.

Yet an understanding of the interdependence of knowing self and God has held a lasting and respected place in Christian theology. Thomas à Kempis argued that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning,”1 and Augustine’s prayer was “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”2 These are but a small sample of the vast number of theologians who have held this position since the earliest days of the church.

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God. John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.”3

Though there has never been any serious theological quarrel with this ancient Christian understanding, it has been largely forgotten by the contemporary church. We have focused on knowing God and tended to ignore knowing ourselves. The consequences have often been grievous—marriages betrayed, families destroyed, ministries shipwrecked and endless numbers of people damaged.

Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.

Consider the way a lack of self-knowledge affected the life of a well-known pastor and his congregation. No one would have doubted this man’s knowing of God—at least before his very public downfall. He had built a very successful ministry around his preaching, and there was no reason to suspect that he did not personally know the truths he publicly proclaimed. Nor was there any obvious reason to question his knowing of himself. Anyone who thought about the matter would probably have judged his self-understanding to be deep. His sermons often included significant self-disclosure, and he seemed to know how to be vulnerable before God.

But as for many of us, all of that was more appearance than reality. The self this pastor showed to the world was a public self he had crafted with great care—a false self of his own creation. Between this public self and his true experience lay an enormous chasm. Both that chasm and his inner experience lay largely outside his awareness.

Suddenly the gap between his inner reality and external appearance was exposed. Things that he did not know or accept about himself welled up within him and shattered the illusion his life represented. Lust led to sexual involvement with a woman he was counseling, just as greed had earlier led to misuse of church funds. As these things became public, the lie that was his life imploded. It was a lie he had lived before his family, closest friends, congregation, God and himself. It was a lie that grew from the soil of self-ignorance.

There is no need to identify this man, nor even to give him a fictitious name. His story is all too familiar. He reminds us of Jesus’ teaching about the dangers of the blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14)—both easily falling into a pit of pain and despair. Just how serious is this? According to Jesus, it is better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone about your neck than to cause one person to stumble in such a manner (Matthew 18:6). This pastor, and many others like him, have caused not just one but thousands to stumble and left them with devastating wounds.

Knowledge That Fills

This man was not short on knowledge about either himself or God. But none of it did him any good. None of it was worthy of being called transformational knowing.

Not all knowledge transforms. Some merely puffs us up like an overfilled balloon. And you know what happens to overfilled balloons!

Actor and filmmaker Woody Allen often speaks publicly of his decades in psychoanalysis—three or four sessions per week on a couch, saying whatever came into his mind, allowing his analyst’s periodic interpretations of the meaning of these free associations to guide his exploration. However, there is little evidence that Allen’s self-knowledge has brought him freedom or psychological health. In fact, making his continuing neurotic struggles the hallmark of his public character, he often focuses his sardonic humor on the limits of self-understanding as a means of change.